When is the right time to tell your kids about the birds and the bees?

WITH so much available at their fingertips these days kids are being exposed to all sorts of sexual information. So when is the right time for parents to talk sex with their kids?

Cleo Glyde

Sunday StyleMay 10, 20157:31am

Talking about sex with your kids can become a bit overwhelming.Source:ThinkStock

WHEN you sign up for motherhood, there’s a checklist of possibilities you’d better get down with.

You may: end up with a post-baby tummy that resembles jelly attacked by a whip; go back to the Stone Age each time the school fees whiz around (so soon?); find that dark under-eye circles really are the new black and simply cave in to Helena Bonham Carter scarecrow chic.

But it’s all worth it for those moments that flood you with gooey, sentimental love, like my own curly-haired toddler boy’s wide-eyed wonderment, asking: “Is Mother Nature God’s wife?”

So the one thing more confronting than a five-week-old ham sandwich in a school backpack is the werewolf transition of said adorable innocent into a hormonal teenager. Fifteen hits and you’d better get a flak jacket, because the permission-optional Facebook hot-tub parties are about to begin.

This is the cue for parents to switch to a more demanding Obi-Wan Kenobi role – yes, it’s time for the sex talk (cue eerie organ music).

There was no parental call to arms for me as a teen in the ’80s. Formal sex education compromised of a uterus diagram or two in biology class and leafing through a dusty old Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at home. Being under lock and key at Catholic convent school from age six to 18 was the icing on the cake – sex was a really big deal.

Sex chitchat was counterintuitive at my house. My central-casting Irish mother dresses in top-to-toe tweed and has The Priests piping through the house. Walking in during a particularly eye-watering Samantha Jones scene in Sex and the City on TV recently, she exclaimed, “My god, the disgraceful things poor girls have to do these days. No wonder the pope has to go on a world tour!” My dad sticks to his favourite hobby: politics.

Sex talk has become a lot more accessible since the introduction of the internet.Source:Getty Images

Parents may feel awkward about The Conversation, but it’s surely not all beer and skittles for kids, either? As teens, my friends and I would have cringed at a serious parental powwow, screaming “Nooo!” and scanning for the exits.

With my son’s 18th birthday approaching, I started to feel guilty about not being sensible, sane and Scandinavian enough. Should I have positioned myself at the enlightened end of the sex-education spectrum? (In Oslo, I once saw three generations of a family blithely hanging out nude together in a sauna, hang-up-free.) As a single mum, I had shown my son amazing books, films, travels and people, but had ducked and weaved around sexuality, nattering on about romance, feelings and “how women like to be seen and really heard”.

My gentle-giant son is sphinx-like when it comes to girls. One day I tried to open the conversation (at 1.96m, he towered over me. Yes, I was in a Monty Python sketch).

“So, how about I tell you about the birds and the bees?” I asked.

“How about I tell you about the birds and the bees, Mum?” he riposted. Grab skateboard; exit stage left.

Is it hopelessly naive in our era of hyper-sexualised pop culture and internet porn for contemporary parents to think they even need to brief curious kids? Was this disheartening reality what I was really trying to avoid by staying in a fool’s paradise and wiggling out of this serious responsibility?

Don’t beat yourself up, advises Dan Savage, the US relationships writer who’s been making me laugh with his Savage Love column since the ’90s. In a podcast, he assures parents that the birds/bees talk is always going to be weird. “It was just as difficult for me to talk about it with my own child,” Savage has claimed. He realised he had “screwed up” the talk when his son DJ subsequently accused his two daddies of having sex for no reason, because they can’t make a baby. “I realised that we had left out 99.99 per cent of sex that humans have, what human sexuality is all about: pleasure, intimacy, release, connection… All we had covered was reproductive biology.”

Sex education is taught at some schools but it’s still a conversation parents should have with their kids.Source:Getty Images

He suggests opening the discussion at age nine, then starting the ball rolling on birth control at 15 – but completely owns the icky awkwardness. “We didn’t want to be the ‘nudist parents’ who are too comfortable talking about sex with their own kids and kids’ friends, just creeping them out. Things should be appropriately awkward!” His suggestions for the birds and bees menu: birth control, consent, sexting, parties. “I say to DJ, ‘Let’s get this over with as fast as possible.’”

I want to – and have – co-raised a fine young man. He’ll walk in the door with a girlfriend any moment, so I must find my place on the spectrum between my most liberated friend (and fabulous mum), Rebecca, who believes in baskets of bedside condoms and blisteringly honest anatomical sex talks, and my hippie-ish Greek friend, Kristina, all heart and bear hugs, who assures her teen son he was created “in love and tenderness” and focuses on Tantric connection. In reality, the genie is out of the bottle and he’ll do his own thing.

I attempt another conversation on a long-haul car trip, asking my son what he thinks of the whole birds/bees discussion. He replies easily, “You’re so cute, Mum. It’s all part of life and perfectly natural.” I laugh and remember that hand-wringing about the next generation is as age-old as sex itself. It’s time I got educated and learnt my own timely lesson: the kids are all right.